Last week, I reflected on how fortunate I am to be in my current location in the midst of coronavirus and unrest: I'm now into my second week living alone in a house in the woods in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. I'm not really entirely alone, actually; I saw my mom today, I saw my dad and brother this past weekend, and I see other people whenever I go for a walk. Everyone around here, though, is tremendously quiet. It's rather like whenever I would go on family vacations to Maine as a kid. The quiet in that circumstance, though, is mitigated by being around family. You have each other for company. Here, where I am now, I have to learn to have myself as company.
Yesterday I went for a long walk and took the picture above on the way. As a young poet, I naturally am very picky when it comes to evaluating my influences. I caricature my tastes by liking "difficult" poets (whatever that means) and looking down a tiny bit on "easier" poets (and I doubt that "easy" poetry is a real phenomenon). A good example of such an "easy" poet is Robert Frost. Of course, snobbery is probably often disguised envy. Frost is omnipresent; he has certainly influenced me, and in high school choir I sang a setting of his very popular poem "The Road Not Taken", which naturally comes to mind regarding my walk in the woods yesterday.
Today I went to Tim's Used Books in Provincetown, MA, and I bought 10 books, both poetry (from Milton to Pablo Neruda) and prose (from Kafka to D.H. Lawrence). I'm looking forward to my new reading, alongside some books I brought with me and which I already started moving through. (And, of course, I'm continuing to write, and I'm also going through some stuff I've already written.)
I've often reflected since the beginning (and ending) of my senior year of college on how odd it feels to transition to adulthood, since that's, at least, the moment that graduating from college is often thought to signify. The phenomenon of coronavirus certainly helps to accentuate the strangeness of how that feels. Lots of people are genuinely suffering right now, and I'm not. I'm very lucky to have such a secluded space for my own reflections and whatever fruits, aesthetic and personal, they might bring.
